Hi,

I'm currently in the midst of my first foray into meshes/textures, and I'm stuck. I'm trying to make the dust/mist effects you find in dungeons not glow in the dark, but only reflect light. Making them not glow in the dark was easy, I just turned the Emmissive Color to black in the NiMaterialProperty of the mesh in NifSkope. I then found that the Specular Color setting had no effect, so I looked around and saw that you can also use the alpha channel of a normal map as a specular map. The file I'm working on is:

meshes\dungeons\misc\fx\fxmistgroundeffect01.nif

The corresponding texture is: textures\dungeons\misc\AtmosphereCloud01.dds

I created a normal map for the texture using the tutorial http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/GIMP:Retexturing_Oblivion#Part_03:_The_Basic_Normal_Map, and found that it did indeed behave as I wanted it, reflecting light quite nicely.

The one problem is that transparency doesn't quite work when two or more billboards overlap - instead, I can see the straight edges of the texture, and the bits that are supposed to be transparent darken the stuff behind, I think. Here's a http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt255/WrinklyNinja1/Cava%20Obscura%20WIP/Oblivion2010-10-1316-27-09-76.jpg. And http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt255/WrinklyNinja1/Cava%20Obscura%20WIP/Oblivion2010-10-1316-27-15-96.jpg.

The only things I've done is edit the Emissive Color of the mesh, and create a normal map using the tutorial linked, but the transparency issue doesn't occur unless I have a normal map (the emissive change turns the mesh invisible if I don't have one): vanilla looks fine. Hence I think I'm doing something wrong with my normal map, or some other setting in the mesh in NifSkope needs to be changed too to accommodate for the normal map, does anyone have ideas?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I realise that this isn't strictly CS-related, but I figured this was the more appropriate forum, and its denizens have always managed to help in the past.

There is a reason why not a single Particle Texture has a normal map....

And that would be? Newbie here, you're going to have to spell things out. Is it totally impossible or something, and if so, can you think of any other way to achieve what I'm trying?

Not Supported by GameBryo, as a matter of fact this is not supported by damn near any game engine -> I have worked on exactly one that allowed Particle Textures to also use a Normal Map and that was a Tech demo that was never meant to be a real game.

If you want this you are going to have to create the effect from scratch with Meshes using a combination of Transform Controllers and Alpha Controllers to get the most basic of Particle Emulation.

Darn. The alternative sounds quite complicated - do you have any suggested links to info pages or tutorials (aside from what's on the CS wiki - I can use the search for that) that would help me along building such an effect?

EDIT: Does that mean I have to get Blender too, or is this sort of thing still possible through just NifSkope - bearing in mind that I don't intend to change the geometry if I can help it, I want that to look like vanilla's. Also, you're saying particle effects - the nif is composed of a lot of billboarded textures (though there are other effects that use particles for sure, eg. fxcloudthick01.nif from the same folder), is this a case of the same thing said differently?

Sorry if I'm asking silly questions, you say normal maps aren't supported for nifs built in that way, but the normal map is clearly doing something - I'm a bit confused, I would have thought no support == no effect.

Backing up a lot to the original problem: you started on the normal map path because Specular wasn't doing anything in the Material Property. Isn't that one of those things that needs a related property set before it has any effect? E.g you need a "NiAlphaProperty" before transparency happens.

Only https://sites.google.com/site/saidenstorm/oblivion3dsmaxanimationtutorial, and its for Max.



Blender has zero ability to export advanced Controllers it can only export NiTransformControllers and has very basic support for NiGeomMorphControllers -> you can get the entire thing out of Max but you have to own Max :/, what your left with is Blender for the initial setup you can create the Planes (Basically what a Particle is) and animate their movement Translation, Rotation, Scale set up the Textures and Properties required and export that to a working Nif then from there open a Beth.nif and find a NiAlphaController and just copy/paste that into your nif and add it to every mesh (each mesh will be required to have it own Material Property (as in not a shared Property) that way you can animate each meshes alpha individually from there its just testing and trial and error once you get the setup you want it can be used multiple times for different effects.

It honestly sounds more complicated then it is once you get started the hardest part will be getting the Translation, Rotation and Scaling done -> personally everytime I have to do this I either set up a bunch of Paths and use Path Constraints to do the animation for me or I set up Noise Controllers and just tinker with the Settings until I find something I like.



The game supports Normal Maps and looks for them to be present what it does not support are Normal Maps for instanced Geometry -> Particles.

In the same way you can not use Normal Maps with Flip Controllers or TextureTransform Controllers as the presence of a normal Map disables the Controller.



That was pretty much implied to have been present as they are present on all particle systems and required for them to even function correctly.

Thanks for the replies then. I'm actually pretty ill ATM, but once I'm feeling better I'll try to stumble through what you've said.

zomg. dude. I totally didn't know that. I had some issues with custom particles a couple years ago. i was probably using normal maps /faceplam